Flash Pulp 123 – Moving Parts: a Collective Detective Chronicle, Part 1 of 1
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode one hundred and twenty-three.
Tonight we present, Moving Parts: a Collective Detective Chronicle, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp123.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)
This week’s episodes are brought to you by the free audio-novella, Boiling Point.
Find out more at http://neilcolquhoun.com
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight, the Collective Detective attempts to pick a murderer from amongst a mob.
Flash Pulp 123 – Moving Parts: a Collective Detective Chronicle, Part 1 of 1
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
“The six month period before the last date tracked in the trio of archives that acts as the backbone of the Collective Detective is basically considered the edge of the world by most contributors.”
Mitch straightened his tie.
“A lot of members of the collective hate working edge-cases, which is probably why I love them. The way some of those guys act, you’d think the ‘net ceased to exist once the NSA stopped tapping everything in 2008, but really its just that they’d rather not do the kind of legwork necessary to track something that went over the line – you know, joining forums, following blogs, trawling news sites.
“It really means that there’s plenty of leads in that period that are actually pretty easy pickings; things that go un-looked into just because of their vintage.”
The lawyer nodded, coaxing him to continue.
“That’s how I came to open the file on Jesse Barber.
“I was looking over the stubs – the list of cold cases that could do with some poking at – and noticed something about a furry who’d been stabbed to death in a parking lot. Now, I’m no naughty mascot myself, but I’ve always had quite a bit of sympathy for those folks. I truly believe that someday we’ll do away with racism and bigotry, but I’m also fairly sure we’ll never get to a point where we’ll tolerate a man in a raccoon costume dining in a high-end restaurant.
“Anyhow, he’d been at a meet-up with other suiters, outside a comic convention, when it happened. I know they have a bit of a bad reputation, but everything we dug up said it was nothing seedy, just a networking thing for other local people with a similar interest, and an opportunity to freak out a bunch of Burger King employees when they finally got hungry.
“My first step was to open a thread regarding all of the Facebookers who’d RSVP’d, and the contributors started nibbling at the list to see if there was any previous connection between the attendees and the deceased.
“Next, I tapped Cameron Wallace and Rory Cummings – uh, BallsToTheWallace, and Kid Icarus, to give me a hand with Jesse’s personal emails. Every editor has a style of working, I prefer to keep the juicer stuff close to home, even if it means a lot of tedious shuffling and sorting. I work with Balls pretty regularly; our timezones are just off enough that he can pick things up when I pass out. I’d never interacted with Icarus before, though, I’d just seen his editorial status set to inquisitive, which means he was interested in being assigned some work. His ratings were high, and I thought the fact that he lived in Seattle, like the victim, would be handy.
“The police had already been over the posting on Craigslist announcing the anti-furry NERF-bat flash mob, and we discovered that at the time it went live, it started quite a bit of debate on a bunch of blogs. Most of the furries on site knew there might be a problem, which meant cellphone cameras were out in force. My first job for Icarus was to get a posse together to locate any clips he could find, and to start a catalogue of the faces in the crowd.
“Then I got Balls on looking for secondaries – basically other accounts a user might have been logging on with. People can connect from anywhere; home, libraries, coffee shops, work; and you’ve got to try and back track it all to get the full picture. Sometimes a guy has a wife he doesn’t want accidentally stumbling onto the Hotmail inbox he’s using for the Tranny-Love mailing list, so he only checks it on his laptop, or sometimes its simply that a person only converses with a friend while at work – which is exactly what happened in this case.
“In the mean time, I was attempting to run down those who’d replied to the original listing on Craigslist, hoping to spot somebody with enough hate to want to kill a stranger. The police investigation had decided that it was probably someone in the mob – someone not content to stop at beating the pseudo-animals with fuzzy bats, and that seemed like a pretty logical line of thinking to me.
“I got nowhere fast though – I realized pretty quickly that way more people had shown up at the event than had responded, and I couldn’t find anyone bragging about anything unusual. Icarus was having just as little luck – cell-video still sucked pretty hard in 2004. The only one making progress was Balls, who’d discovered that Mr Barber was very careful about keeping his identity as Kip Hamsterton separate from his life as Jesse the tech guy. Hamsterton had his own set of email addresses, and a pretty large establishment in a virtual world called Second Life, and Barber had a one bedroom apartment and an overprotective mom.”
Mitch licked his lips and rubbed his scruffy goatee.
“We all switched over to letter sorting, and that’s when we found it: Jesse had had a fling at work, with an accountant whose laptop he’d repaired. It had ended abruptly, but even after he’d blocked Margie Feldstead’s address and stopped replying, she’d been sending him vicious emails calling him a perverted monstrosity. It was obvious what had happened – their first emails were full of puppy love, but sometime on or around the 12th, three months into the relationship and a week before his murder, everything had changed. He’d fallen deeply for her, despite her crazy notions about the government, and he’d probably thought that, if he could accept her nuttiness, she could surely accept his.
“We opened the thread regarding Jesse’s correspondence to contributor assistance, and the three of us started plowing into everything Margie-related that we could locate.
“I can sympathize with a guy like Jesse, but Margie was nothing but a closet crazy. She spent a lot of time in the dark corners of the Internet, where anything bad that happens is somehow the result of a Jewish world order conspiracy or an act of Satan. Within twenty-four hours of finding out about Kip, she’d ordered a ballistic knife from a place in Florida. They were supposed to be against the law, but I guess it was sort of semi-legal to sell the hilt and blade as a package, and the spring that did the shooting as a separate item. For the next few days her Google searches from home were entirely obsessed with the Seattle furry community, and when she found out about the flash mob posting, she had her excuse.
“When we came across the confirmation email with the receipt for the knife, I figured that was it. Still, you get into weird legal grounds any time you pull a case out of the archives, so I did what we’re supposed to do when we think we’ve got one in the can: I tagged it for review by the council; the suits over top of the editors who run all the corporate and legal stuff. It can take hours, or even days, to get a response, and, then, it’s usually just to confirm that they’ve called the police, and to thank you for a job well done.
“I don’t know why Cummings – Icarus – didn’t wait to hear the outcome. We don’t often get to see the perp though, except in the occasional news clip, and he must have been riding the adrenaline rush of having cracked the truth. Whatever the case, it’s obvious the intervening years haven’t been too kind to Margie’s stability. Lord knows how a woman in that state manages to get a hold of a handgun.”
From the behind the defense table, the accused, hardened by the time since the death of Jesse Cummings, attempted to lay Mitch low with her glare.
“That will be all,” said the lawyer.
The judge thanked him for his testimony, and the editor vacated the stand.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License. Text and audio commentaries can be sent to skinner@skinner.fm, or the voicemail line at (206) 338-2792 – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.
– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.
References
I’m still recovering from yesterday’s stomach bug, and the majority of my energy is being dedicated to tonight’s Flash Pulp, but I wanted to pop in and share two fantastic research-resources I’ve encountered.
Hungry Monster’s listing of restaurant diner lingo provides some of the best industry-patter I’ve run across.
A sampling:
Gentleman will take a chance: Hash
Radio: A tuna-fish-salad sandwich on toast punning on “tuna down,” which sounds like “turn it down,” as one would the radio knob.
Zeppelins in a fog: Sausages in mashed potatoes.
What could possibly be more amusing? How about Wikipedia’s list of slang terms for police officers.
Asfalt Kovboyu (Asphalt Cowboy): Turkish, slang, relates the modern police officers to cowboys. Police officers are called cowboys in Turkey, due to their lawless acts
Cinder Dick: An old term for railroad police detective, derived from the detective having to walk on the railroad ballast rock, also known as “cinders”
Krawężnik: Polish, from “curb”, designating an officer patrolling the neighbourhood on foot.
Flash Pulp Schedule, etc.
I hate to say it, but tonight’s episode is going to be delayed until tomorrow. I’ve picked up a fantastically angry stomach bug from Mr or Ms Eight, and the three of us have been reduced to moaning heaps.
In the mean time, please enjoy another bit of musical intermixing, as left in the comments for yesterday’s mash-up roundup by H.
Lennox vs Bowie – No More Pressure
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc2cQyTT9u4]
Boil 'em, Mash 'em, Stick 'em in a Stew
Just a quick post to share a couple of mash-up music videos that I discovered via Scott Johnson’s The Morning Stream.
First up, LL Cool J vs Dexy’s Midnight Runners in Knock Out Eileen:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejuMfZdkM2o]
– then a chaser of The Jackson 5 vs Nirvana with Smells Like Rockin’ Robin:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNUTYHJrutw]
Update: Classy fellow, and man about town, BMJ2k of Mr Blog’s Tepid Ride, added another suggestion in the comments, and I feel like it should be added to this bit of mash-hash: AC/DC vs Ghostbusters – Thunder Busters.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiH1wNmZTII]
Any other suggestions?
Robotic Slap Fight
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0aiQAm4RU]
This is a bot out of the University of Pennsylvania, although they apparently received some insight from my favourite of the rock-star roboticist firms, Boston Dynamics.
It doesn’t look like it would last long if placed in a fighting arena against some of the Battlebots of yore, but you’ve got to keep in mind that, in the real world, combat doesn’t take place on a custom built, perfectly level, playing field.
Most of the comments I’ve seen related to this little beast have suggested that it would be useful as some sort of spying device – that wasn’t what popped into my mind at first viewing, however.
Remember that post I wrote regarding the use of trained dogs to attack tanks? This seems like a much simpler delivery system, and one that won’t be scared away by gunfire.
I have a theory that, once lasers reach a certain level of power and can be effectively used to keep our skies clean of aircraft, and once robot drones can be used to automagically take out heavily fortified vehicles, we’ll be back to the bad old days of World War I, cowering in ditches and hoping for trench-foot.
– or, maybe we’ll end up with giant snakes formed of Indian terminators that utilize AK-47s as a tongue:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svOlz2ei4Yk]
(Hat tip to Warren Ellis for the clip.)
Flash Pulp 122 – Mulligan Smith and The Custodian, Part 1 of 1
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode one hundred and twenty-two.
Tonight we present, Mulligan Smith and The Custodian, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp122.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)
This week’s episodes are brought to you by the free audio-novella, Boiling Point.
Find out more at http://neilcolquhoun.com
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight, Mulligan Smith, PI, finds himself in a principal’s office for the first time since his youth.
Flash Pulp 122 – Mulligan Smith and The Custodian, Part 1 of 1
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
Mulligan hadn’t been inside a principal’s office since the age of fourteen, when he’d been on the receiving end of Christopher Nelson’s fist. This particular office wasn’t that different than the one he’d last been in, it seemed to contain the same bookshelf, the same wilted houseplant, and the same battered carpet. Even the whitewashed cement block walls felt all too familiar.
“You understand that this isn’t something I usually do,” Principal Philips was saying. Her suit was prim, if a little old, and there was a red button with yellow text exclaiming “Read, Dang It!”, pinned to her lapel.
Smith nodded, and she continued.
“I mean, we do a police check when they sign on, to be sure they aren’t a sex offender, and Jackson’s record is spotless. Normally I’d never consider bringing in a private investigator – honestly, you’re the first one I’ve ever met.”
“Not that I’m ungrateful for the money,” Mulligan replied, “but, if Mr Evans is only part time, why not just fire him?”
“Well – it’s simply that he’s so good at it. He manages to accomplish about the same, in a few hours on the weekend, as what old Kevin gets done in three days of trundling around behind his cart,” as she paused, she tapped her nose with her index finger, “- and, besides, he works for almost nothing. Frankly, it’s the budget money he’s saved that’s allowing me to hire you. Really, it’s not even like he’s done anything wrong, he’s just – he’s odd.”
* * *
The situation became increasingly complicated as Mulligan began poking around.
It required almost no effort to determine that Evans had a day job as a cosmetic surgeon, and an expensive one. His clients left enthusiastic comments on his website, and his work had been featured repeatedly in the local paper – usually relating to pro bono work he’d carried out on an underprivileged burn victim.
Smith also hit upon an article naming Jackson Evans, MD, in a “win a date with a local eligible bachelor” charity auction. The PI had wondered aloud what such an apparently driven, and well off, fellow was doing single at the age of forty-eight.
Mulligan’s attempt at calling the organization for a new client in-take exam was politely refused with an offer to add his contact info to the extensive waiting list. If there was a line up for the operating room, it seemed unlikely that the doctor was carrying on his weekend work for the extra pay, and, if money was out, the motivations shrank to sex, drugs, power, or revenge.
He preferred when it was money.
* * *
After two wasted weekends of passive observation, Smith decided it was time for a conversation. He tracked Evans down in a third grade classroom, where the man was sitting in silence, with glassy eyes, on a chair intended for an eight-year-old.
“Reminiscing about the old days?” asked Mulligan.
As he waited for a reply, he kept a lock on the man’s pupils, and wondered if the blank look might be an indication of an unsavory addiction.
Clearing his throat, the doctor stood and tucked the yellow plastic chair under the desk at which he’d been resting.
“I was just taking a moment – I’m about done my shift.” The janitor collected himself. “Are you one of the parents? I haven’t seen you around the school before. Do you have permission to be here? I’m sorry, but only authorized personnel are allowed on the premises during weekends.”
“Mrs. Philips is aware of my presence.” Internally, Mulligan chided himself for allowing the janitor to pull rank, then made a move to retake the conversational high-ground. “I’m actually here to ask you a few questions. Consider it an employee satisfaction survey, Jackson.”
“Fine,” replied Evans.
Every response was dispensed in the same flat tone, and Smith began to understand what the Principal had meant by odd – it wasn’t that he was eccentric, it was simply that the man was utterly humourless.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you working here?”
“Why does anyone work anywhere?”
“Well, Dr. Evans, mostly they do it for the money.”
The interviewee raised an eyebrow at the mention of his alternate occupation.
“Is there something wrong with the fact that I have another job?”
“No, but it does bring me back to what I was inquiring: why are you wiling away your Saturdays trawling the primary yard for rotting apple cores, and changing out fluorescent bulbs, instead of cutting open middle-aged housewives with poor self esteem?”
“For love.”
“Love?” Smith asked, mentally weighing the need to file a police report. “Love of the job?”
“No, the love of the boy who sits at this desk.”
Mulligan sighed.
“Uh, care to explain?”
“I’ve worked long hours my entire life. I thought I was doing what was best, really, but when Kayli asked for a divorce, I knew exactly what she’d say: that I was always busy, always preoccupied. I apologized, but she didn’t care by then, she wanted cash – and Jayce. The lawyer she hired was good enough to get her both.”
The PI interrupted the account with an exclamation which immediately felt inappropriate, given his surroundings.
“Sorry, continue,” he said.
“Custody’s pretty stringent. I get to see Jayce once a month, and alternating birthdays. Instead, I come here, and work myself raw so that I can have a few moments to stare at his blotchy paintings,” Evans motioned towards a wall of airplane pictures carried out in bright primary colours. “- or to linger at his desk and wonder if he ever sits there thinking about me.”
As Evans turned to hide the tears draining down his cheeks, Mulligan retreated from the room. His final report, combined with Principal Philips’ budgetary concerns, would ensure the custodian his position for as long as he wanted it.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License. Text and audio commentaries can be sent to skinner@skinner.fm, or the voicemail line at (206) 338-2792 – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.
– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.
Questionable CNN
When CNN finds itself confused, I step in to help.
– because, seriously, he’s been phoning non-stop for something like two years now, and they usually just let it go to voicemail.
I believe so, I’ve heard that Tunisia is an excellent dancer.
I think this is really derived from a dissatisfaction with repetition. Let’s can the symphonic work and get something fresh out there – Daft Punk, for example, did an amazing job on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack.
Despite CNN’s repeated attempts at playing matchmaker, I continue to refuse Meg Ryan’s proposal of marriage.
Finally, something sports related that I can get excited about – bring on the cyborgs!
Lithopedion
Warning: This post discusses items relating to Flash Pulp 121, and definitely contains spoilers. If you haven’t listened to the episode, but intend to, skip the content below.
I just wanted to follow up the last Blackhall with a quick note about the reality of the unpleasant situation in question.
Quotes are from the wikipedia:
A lithopedion, or stone baby, is a rare phenomenon which occurs most commonly when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies on the outside, shielding the mother’s body from the dead tissue of the baby and preventing infection.
I’ve opted not to post the related photos, as they’re easy enough to find via a Google image search should you be so inclined – but, be forewarned: it isn’t a pleasant sight.
The condition was first described in a treatise by the physician Albucasis in the 10th century AD, but fewer than 300 cases have been noted in 400 years of medical literature.
We Posts Stuffs
I don’t usually rail against other people’s grammar, but I found this tweet a little ridiculous.
A few country blocks from our old house, there was a large sign set at the edge of some entrepreneur’s lawn. The beast was made of spray paint and plywood, and proudly announced that “We Cuts Grass” – I wouldn’t hire them, either.